The car wasn't fleeing. It was patrolling.

The pursuit had been almost working for five days, which is a worse place to be than broken. The suspect ran. He just ran badly: slowing for every corner, cruising at speeds a delivery van would be ashamed of, drifting back into traffic as if the chase were somebody else's problem. So I did what the symptom asked for. I raised the maximum speed. I raised the minimum speed. I went through the cornering records in the game's database and loosened them one at a time. Every number moved, and the driving never changed.

It never changed because none of those numbers belonged to the order doing the driving. When the car spawns we hand it a patrol order, so it circles the district in traffic before you arrive and there's no spawn flash. Then you get close, and we issue the order to flee. What I had never done was take the first order away. The car works through its orders in a queue, one at a time. The flee order was real and correct, and it went into the queue behind a patrol order that was never going to end, waiting for a turn that was never coming. Five days tuning a command that never had the wheel.

The fix is one call before ours: cancel the patrol command, then issue the chase. CancelOrInterruptCommand, the name of the order, done. Everything I had spent the week adjusting turned out to have been fine all along, which is the part that stings.

What he does now, confirmed in game rather than in a log: he takes off at full speed, holds the corners without braking for them, stays in combat the whole way and shoots back at you from the car while he drives. Four things I had written down as the definition of a working pursuit, all four at once. Confirmed on 30 August, and the pursuit is frozen from here. It doesn't get touched again.

The same night handed me a second one with the same shape. A bike you had summoned and then destroyed could never be summoned again: it stayed marked as in transit for the rest of the save. I went looking for our bug in the transit bookkeeping and there wasn't one. The block was a guard I had written myself, a check that refused to re-summon a vehicle still on cooldown. I had copied that question straight out of the game's own code without noticing that the game's own popup always answers it with force set to true. It asks, and then overrides itself. I copied the question and left the answer behind.

So this week's rule is narrower than last week's, and it costs more to learn. Before writing a guard, go and read how the base game resolves the same case. Three separate times that night the engine already had an answer and I had laid a layer of my own on top of it, and every one of those layers cost days.